There’s something a little bit retro about the scorn heaped, in some quarters, on ebooks:
As Download the Universe overlord Carl Zimmer has noted, similar charges of cheapening the reading experience were once leveled against paperback books.

It’s fitting, then, that publishers of ebooks are continuing to rediscover the promises and perils of earlier publishing forms. Serialized novels are one of the latest experiments: In September, Amazon launched its Kindle Serials, and in August, Byliner, known primarily for long-form nonfiction, announced that it would be publishing several new novels, including Positron, by Margaret Atwood, in installments.

Yesterday the Washington Post announced that they were hiring a new editor-in-chief. Reporting for the New York Times, Christine Haughney wrote that the Post made the switch because they were struggling with a steep decline in readership. It's not until deep in the piece that Haughney makes a startling statement:

"The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets, like Politico, whose founders include former Washington Post reporters."

Politico certainly didn't bring the Washington Post to its current moment of crisis singlehandedly. But it is striking to me that a web operation started from scratch in 2007 could baloon so fast that it could become a major threat to what was once one of the world's leading newspapers.

My attention was drawn to this buried lead because I've recently been getting to know a new player in the science news business, called Matter. This morning they are launching their web site, and their first piece of long-form journalism. It's way too early to predict whether Matter will become the Politico of the science world. But they definitely are entering the arena with impressive style.

11/09/2012

Cultural critics may bemoan the Internet's effect on our ability to remember, but one has to admit that, as a collective mental filing cabinet, it has its good sides.

This place we've built is immense and variegated, full of stray details and forgotten databases. It is a thick and tangled memory-bank, to mix science metaphors, full of brightly colored plants and stones and tiny parasitic mushrooms clutched in a net of sphagnum moss. For the intrepid e-naturalist, there are great treasures to be found here.

Or at least great curiosities. I think that's what I'd call the memoirs of a rocket designer who was born in the age of the tsars and spent years in the secret Soviet space program, masterminding the control systems of some of the earliest spacecraft.